Austria group to sue Facebook

Vienna, Dec. 4 (Reuters): An Austrian student group plans to sue Facebook Inc, the world’s biggest social network, for failing to do enough to protect the privacy of its hundreds of millions of members.

Privacy campaign group europe-v-facebook, which has been lobbying for better data protection by Facebook for over a year, said today it planned to sue the US company in Ireland, where it has its international headquarters.

The move is one of a number of campaigns against the giants of the Internet, which are under pressure from investors to generate more revenue from their huge user bases but which also face criticism for storing and sharing personal information.

Internet search engine Google, for example, has been told by the EU to make changes to its new privacy policy, which pools data collected on individual users across its services, and from which users cannot opt out. Europe-v-facebook has won some concessions from Facebook, notably pushing it to switch off its facial recognition feature.